February, 2023

Whether we like it or not, business process management has moved up the ranks and has become an indispensable tool that every CEO wants to utilize. It isn’t anything new and it has proven its utility, especially during the pandemic. By fully automating a set of small tasks, as part of an entire end-to-end process, businesses benefit by increasing efficiencies and cost-savings on a company level. BPM packs up a heavy punch on its own. Now, imagine BPM combined with AI (Artificial Intelligence) and RPA (Robotic Processed Automation). The result: a monstrous automation supercharger called Intelligent Automation. In this article, we’ll try to get a better understanding of what IA is, how it applies to business, and what benefits it brings, and of course some real-world examples to better illustrate the capabilities of this modern solution. As always grab your coffee, tea, or whatever drink you prefer, and let’s get down to business.

What is Intelligent Automation?

Intelligent Automation, sometimes also referred to as cognitive automation or hyper-automation is the combined use of business process management (BPM), and robotics process automation (RPA), to form a solution that enhances business operations by simplifying processes, freeing up resources and improving overall operational efficiencies. Intelligent automation has numerous applications. For example, IA can be used in the insurance sector to calculate payments, address compliance needs, make predictions, and others.

We can separate IA into its three core components — AI, BPM, and RPA — in order to try and explain it better.

Artificial Intelligence – This is how IA basically makes decisions. AI is probably the most important component of intelligent automation. Its role is to analyze structured and unstructured data, by utilizing machine learning and algorithms, so that businesses can develop a substantial knowledge base and formulate predictions based on that data.

Business Process Management – We already mentioned this a couple of times. BPM automates workflows, not single trivial tasks, and helps businesses across various industries to streamline processes, providing agility and consistency.

Robotic Process Management – This basically acts as the brute force of IA. RPA uses software robots to handle various tasks such as extracting data and filling out forms.

These three components combine to form the solution that we call IA, which simplifies and streamlines processes and ultimately improves customer experience.

Benefits of Intelligent Automation

By supercharging automation using IA there are a plethora of benefits. We mentioned two in the heading of the article: cost saving and process efficiency. Others that are worthy of mentioning include increased staff productivity and satisfaction, improved regulatory compliance, and enhanced customer experience.

Reduced costs – by default automating processes saves resources because it reduces the amount of time needed to complete tasks. If a person does a task manually not only it takes more time, but there’s also the risk of making mistakes, and fixing those mistakes also costs resources.

Process efficiency – AI’s supercharged automation ensures consistency and provides a high quality of processes. Intelligent automation not only measures and monitors process execution but also proposes ideas to improve it.

Increased staff satisfaction and productivity – By properly automating business processes you will allow employees to focus on other tasks, which are more meaningful and important to them and to the business. Also, the time saved by automating tasks can be utilized by employees to learn, develop and improve new skills.

Improved regulatory compliance – Most companies operate under strict government and industry-specific regulations and laws. With intelligent automation, businesses can ensure those rules are met every time, with little to no room for errors.

Improved customer experience – Customers want immediate and accurate solutions to a problem they might run into. Chatbots are a perfect example of how IA can boost customer experience – they are available 24/7, they respond fast, and can solve multiple cases at once accurately.

Application of Intelligent Automation

Due to IA’s resourcefulness and error-free reassurance, it can be applied in various sectors and in different business areas. Here are a few examples of how intelligent automation can affect a couple of industries.

Healthcare

Bots with conversational AI capabilities can help patients schedule their appointments with a specific physician by interacting with them and figuring out their health problems. They can also help with reducing no-shows by sending reminders and providing a simple way to reschedule or cancel appointments.

Financial services & banking

By utilizing intelligent automation, banks can speed up know-your-customer (KYC) processing times, reduce error rates, and improve regulatory compliance. Also, by using AI-powered automation financial institutions can reduce the manual paperwork during loan application processing.

Retail

By leveraging IA retailers can better manage stockouts and waste. Intelligent bots can use AI/ML models and historical sales data to estimate the optimum inventory levels for different products, in different places and at times.

Manufacturing

Intelligent bots can be connected to machinery by sensors, thus allowing manufacturers to keep track of the health of their equipment in real-time, to help predict machine failures, and set maintenance schedules.

Insurance

Claims processing is a labor-intensive process, and making this process as efficient as possible is important. AI-powered automation can accelerate document processing which can help increase profitability and customer retention: 87% of customers say effective claims processing influences their decision to choose an insurer.

Closing lines

Оrganizations must continue to innovate and adopt various technologies in order to keep an edge and stay competitive in their respective sectors. Intelligent automation is one of those technologies that can truly transform the way businesses operate and deliver. The main benefits are faster operations, cheaper costs, lower risk of mistakes, and appeasing people from trivial day-to-day tasks. IA will undoubtedly change the future of how businesses will operate, and those that don’t implement it will find it extremely difficult to remain relevant.

Every team has its highs and lows. Sometimes everybody in the team is laser-focused on a common goal and gets after it every day relentlessly, and constantly pushes themselves and others. And sometimes productivity plummets like an anchor with no apparent reason or explanation. There isn’t a simple solution to that issue. But there are guidelines and steps to take into consideration when battling with the lack of your team’s productivity. In this article we will talk about what team productivity is, we’ll discuss how you can try to increase it, and last but not least how to measure your efforts to better see if they bear any fruit. As always, fetch your favorite drink, and let’s move forward, shall we?

What Is Team Productivity?

Productivity is a metric that is used to describe how well an individual or a team creates as output. For individuals it usually refers to how much they accomplished in a day, as for teams – it translates to how many projects or assigned tasks have been successfully completed for longer periods of time (week, month, quarter, etc.) Being productive correlates directly with how valuable you are. The more productive an employee is, the more important he/she becomes to the company. Productive employees and teams are invaluable assets to any company. But they don’t just appear out of thin air. A lot of effort and time is expended to cultivate a healthy environment in which people can thrive easily. Leadership is also an important part of the productivity puzzle. Low-performing teams are generally associated with poor leadership. Every team is capable of performing well so long as the leader responsible for that team is doing a proper job. There aren’t bad teams, there’s just bad leadership. So, what can leaders do to enable their teams to be more productive?

How To Increase Team Productivity?

As we pointed out earlier, there is no way to automatically turn up your team’s productivity — it takes a lot of work and effort from both sides. Hacks and quick fixes don’t exist, but there are realistic ways to try to increase productivity.

Strive for quality, not quantity

Acquiring monthly targets is important for the overall morale of the team. Most of the time they all come down to hitting a certain number of a certain metric. For example, a support team operating within a region has to close a certain amount of tickets per month. This can be good, but it can also backfire. The team might successfully hit the monthly target and get their bonuses, but customer satisfaction might drop. While quantity is important in the short term, quality is way more important in the long term.

Prioritize and execute

Today’s businesses are complex. Teams often have to juggle between several projects and individuals have to be responsible for more than one thing. When down in the weeds, teams often can lose sight of what’s important. Having a common goal to serve as a navigation point is paramount. It should serve as a compass and as a unifying factor. If everyone is on track with the main goal, with what’s important, they will know how to prioritize properly and avoid confusion.

Healthy communication

Even top performers can’t thrive for long periods of time if they are under continued, ongoing stress. Ensure that the company culture promotes a healthy balance between work and life. Allowing employees to communicate freely and openly also sets an environment in which they can express their worries and personal life issues which might hinder their performance temporarily.

Promote growth

You shouldn’t immediately fire someone if they aren’t performing their tasks well. As we mentioned before, this might be because they are going through a rough patch in their private life. A lot of the time, underperformers just need a bit of training. Also If you allow employees to express how they want their careers to evolve, they will tell you the exact seminars/workshops/courses they want to attend in order to improve and perform better. By investing in your employees’ growth you ensure that their performance will stay on top.

Technology is your friend

The tech sector changes hourly. It feels like newer and better products arrive each month and if you don’t take advantage of them, it feels as if you are missing out and you’re losing traction. You don’t have to use different products if the one you currently use is getting the job done. But you have to consider upgrading when the right time/product comes. Investing in the right tools can give you an advantage and can significantly improve productivity.

How to track and measure the productivity of your team?

If you don’t have a way to measure something you can’t really understand if it’s going well or badly. Before trying to improve productivity you have to set a baseline for where it currently stands. Output isn’t entirely correlated with productivity. Productivity is not as easily as quantifiable as the number of projects completed. However, there are a few things you can keep track of to better understand improvement in output.

Firstly, utilize the tools you have to see how quickly your team moves through tasks. You can assume that there’s an increase in productivity if there’s an increase in completed projects per week or completion speed.

Second, keep track of your metrics and KPIs. Although this is a lagging indicator of success, it’s still a solid sign of how your teams are performing. If you notice an improvement in key metrics it likely means that there is an increase in your teams’ productivity. It’s not a direct correlation but it can be used as an additional source to check if performance is increasing.

Last but not least, trust your employees. If you cultivated a safe space in which everybody can share their thoughts without fear, then you can be certain that your team leaders will tell you if the team’s productivity is slowing down. Use team meetings or one-on-ones as an opportunity to talk about if stuff is going well or badly and if the answer is the latter, to share ideas on how you can address potential issues.

Closing lines

Productivity is a complex metric that involves multiple corporate processes to measure and improve. When focusing on increasing a team’s efficiency and productivity, don’t just turn up the heat, because you will burn them out. Instead, take it slow and steady. When you can identify which aspects of your team need improvement or which aspects of management, you can make the necessary adjustments and improve overall productivity within the company.